Musings and Photos about Life and Real Estate Development in Post-Industrial Brooklyn and New York City

Sunday, July 01, 2007

Lawsuits & Repairs on Coney's Trip and Fall Boardwalk

Yesterday evening, we reported that there were 16 separate instances of litigation in 2005 and 2006 about injuries sustained by people walking on what we like to call Coney Island's trip and fall boardwalk. The city was sued seven times and settled nine cases. One can expect significant lawsuits this year as well, as parts of the boardwalk are still in horrendous shape and some are frighteningly deteriorated, in the sense that someone might fall through boards and drop 6-8 feet. On Friday night, a tiny segment of the boardwalk near Astroland was in the midst of repairs that started this week, as the photo above shows. If you want to see what we said about this issue last year, you can click here, and to see what we said earlier this year, click here.

We didn't understand in previous years why the situation was addressed and we stil don't understand why it's better to continue a situation that is injury and lawsuit bait, rather than fixing the problem. A few weeks ago, we sat and watched a particularly bad spot for about fifteen minutes. During that time we counted 12 people that tripped (no one that fell, however), four of them stubbing toes hard enough to shout or course.